Today on Not About Apples, it’s Tau Day! Pictures of pastry, a rallying cry for new tau-themed fun for next year, and most of all a link to Michael John Blake fantastic video which makes music from the digits of τ.

Back after a long hiatus on Not About Apples, where I’m kicking off my countdown to Tau Day 2011 (which is next Tuesday) in true Cap-style, by digressing about exponential functions. Some links to what Tau Day is all about, and a fuzzy place between subjectivity and objectivity.

Today at Not About Apples, the disconnect between the our inituitive grasp of reasonable-sized numbers and our confusion over huge numbers, as motivated by this quotation from Ron Graham.

The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can’t even begin to think about in any very definite way. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.﻿

Includes a math gem you’ve almost surely never heard before, which you almost surely won’t believe.

Today at Not About Apples, I comment on two collections of “mathematical fiction”: Riot at the Calc Exam and Other Mathematically Bent Stories by Colin Adams and Reality Conditions: Short Mathematical Fiction by Alex Kasman.

My favorite line of the post: “Mathematics is still looking for its Victor Borge.”